


Fresh Eden

by Vera (Vera_DragonMuse)



Category: Mad Max Series (Movies), The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Crossover, F/M, M/M, after everything
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-05-22
Updated: 2015-05-22
Packaged: 2018-03-31 18:36:28
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,983
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3988486
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Vera_DragonMuse/pseuds/Vera
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>They find out about Nueden from a man with a long stare.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Fresh Eden

They learn about Nueden from a man who shares their fire for a single night. His stare was a familiar one, they see it in each other from time to time. He said very little, but gave them the map after Steve shared their meager meal with him and Bucky lifted the back end of his car up to help with a wheel change. 

“Should we?” Steve spread the map over the palm of his hand. Lately, sand has encrusted in creases of his hand that were not there before, the first tiny signs of aging. Bucky’s hair went white long ago, still thick and halfway down his back in a braid and there were crow’s feet gathered at the corners of his eyes that radiated out. 

Natasha had not seen her reflection in a long time, only partially by choice. She counted her years in the seconds it took her go from sitting to standing. Once it hadn’t been seconds at all, an eyeblink flash of black leather. Now it was three entire seconds in linens that melted into the sand. 

There was a cane involved though none of them discussed it. A gnarled ancient piece of wood that had appeared...when? Years now, probably. Her right knee, shattered by a bullet and then jumbled like a puzzle piece in the ensuing fight, could not be put back together again even with accelerated healing. The cane was a good place to hide a knife and the thick knot at the top held a bolt of steel that ensured a concussion when it impacted with a skull. It was as much a part of her as Steve’s shield or Bucky’s arm though the paint had come off of both, now unmarked metal symbolic of nothing. 

“Should we?” Steve asked again, holding the map to her. Bucky would not weigh in unless forced and they usually deemed it too cruel to push. 

“Why?” She ground her hand over the top of the cane, the tip pushing into the barren earth. 

“We need a place.” 

“Do we? What about our purpose? Our revenge?” 

“We’ve done...” Steve trailed off. They let the silence take over, the embers of last night’s fire releasing the last intoxicating scent of fuel. Then into the silence, Bucky said, 

“I’m tired.” 

And he looked so very weary, an exhaustion thicker than mud in his voice and that heavy weight of surviving pounding his shoulders into rounded hunch. 

“Then we rest,” she looked away from them to the slice of golden light across the horizon. “But just until we’re ready to hit the road again.”

They humor her, twin nods and she ignores it. 

They have two vehicles these days, her motorcycle and an RV. The motorcycle was more of a relic, carefully preserved for moments of need and otherwise babied in it’s corner of the RV. The RV... 

“Hello, Steve,” a smooth deep voice greeted them as the climbed aboard. 

“Hi, Jones,” Steve touched the steering wheel gently. “How was the night?” 

“Dark. Sandy. Empty.” 

“You get lonely?” Natasha settled into the passenger seat, half-aware of Bucky climbing to his porthole in the roof. 

“Only when you’re outside,” the AI put on an exaggerated sigh. “Where to today? Drive straight until we find trouble?” 

“Sorry to disappoint, but we’ve got a destination,” Steve slotted the RV into drive. 

“How proactive of you. Coordinates?” 

“Handdrawn map. Best guess is north, about thirty miles.” 

They drove in silence, leaving behind the footprints of the stranger who had told them the story of a brave new colony built on the bones of a fallen dictator. The books they had once carried with them as precious relics had long ago been dedicated to memory, sold off in exchange for more valuable things. Every game had been long exhausted. 

Instead, there was the silence and the greedy inhalation of strangers’ stories. Told and retold to each other in the ensuing days. Pieced over and parsed out and sorted. Then written down in Natasha’s neat hand into a roadmap of where they had been, commented on with Steve’s portraits and titled with Bucky’s perfect internal calendar that kept rolling long after it lost it’s relevance. 

She looked over it as they drove (written in pencil made with a knife, coal and metal with soft graphite-like marks that remind her of dashed off notes on bright squares of paper) and tried to fit in the stranger’s words and sketchy signs drawn in sand. Here were the pillars of red rock and the jagged teeth of Bullettown with heavy warning underlined and a date nearly a generation old beside it. 

Bucky put his arms around her seat, fingertips brushing her arms, chin half resting on her shoulder, cheeks pressed together.   
“Will it really be green?” He asked her. 

“Wouldn’t that be something.” She cupped her hands over his, their swollen knuckles old friends, complaining of the heat together. 

Even the idea of green still made her think of Bruce. He had gone out over the salt flats, determined to bring them back a sign of life. Hulk’s giant hand giving them a slow wave, his feet leaving indentations in the sparkling waste. They’d waited three months for him. Then they’d left a marker and gone back every year for a few days to see if he was waiting. 

And then. 

Then. They just didn’t anymore. 

There was no grave for Bruce like there were for the others. No spot on the map marked with one of Steve’s sketches if not a gravestone. Bruce’s gravesite was miles long, nearly as big as the piece of her that went with him and never returned. 

Bucky put his cheek to hers, the stubble a welcome burn over her skin, bringing her back to the now. 

“Music?” Steve asked. 

“Please,” Natasha and Bucky said together. 

“Driving music, Jones.” 

They always listen to AC/DC first out of careful homage, but after that the AI switches through eras of music from Baroque to the last stolen recordings of the NeoPunkFolk wave. Lately, Natasha had circled back to psychedic rock, listening to long strings of guitar licks while the sun blazed through the RV’s front window. 

Maybe she was turning into a lizard, asleep on her rock. 

“Hm,” a slight rise and fall from Steve’s lips, but Bucky came ridged to attention and Natasha left behind her musings. 

There, just as the madman had said, was a rising mountain of rock. The average eye would see only rock face, but with a point of Steve’s finger, they could make out the outline of an entrance, to guards posted on either side. 

They parked the RV twenty feet from the door when the guards started to look too twitchy. They got out together, not hiding their weapons, but keeping them holstered. 

“We were told this was a sanctuary,” Steve lifted up his chin, kept his face blank. “We can offer work and trade for a few nights rest.” 

The guards blinked in sand caked faces and started signing rapidly between them. Natasha tried to follow along, but it bore no resemblance to the language she had once carefully learned. Their hands were unusually graceful, long fluid fingers and extended wrists. A mutation of the finest kind, the joints each flexible as water. 

“Can you read?” One finally asks, hoarse and genderless. 

“Yes.” 

“Here,” a twist of those fingers and a plague shines out. 

_Welcome, friend._

_Enter here and be bound to our laws._   
_1\. All life is sacred._  
 _2\. Cause no pain and no pain will be given to you._   
_3\. All people are entitled to safety, a bed, three meals and what they create with their own hands. Take nothing that is not freely given._  
 _If you cannot abide, turn around now. If you enter and break these laws, you will be expelled._

“Huh,” Bucky huffed against her shoulder. 

“Yeah,” she clicked her tongue and Steve smiled, not fast and wide like he might’ve once, but that happy grin all the same. 

“We’d like to come in.” 

There were wonders inside, a waterfall making rainbows against the sky and crashing into a man-made river with very real mud on the banks. Groups of humans gathering not in frantic hive motion, but deliberate fetch and carry. Some were even resting, here an old woman with her swollen feet in the cool mud, there a group of children scratching out a game in the sand. 

There are many women, a wonder all on it’s own. Young and old alike, they move about their business alongside men. Clothing was loose linen wrapped in personalized style though large hats and white paint over exposed skin shield them from the sun. The guards never left their post, but a slim tall man with a shaved head and eyes socketed deep in his head, leads them down the riverside. 

“I smell something....” Bucky murmurs and she puts her nose to the air. At first, she thought it was only the river. Moving water fresh against the bedrock had it’s own keen scent. 

Their guide took them into the mountainside where lines of people carried water, children back inside. The sound of the waterfall echoed through the rock, a dull roar that could never be mistaken for an engine. The tunnel led upward into the hollow center of the mountain, a sweeping staircase circling around and around the interior. Voices echoed up and down, carrying laughter and shouts between floors. There was more industry here, workshops open to the raucous outside showing clusters of people gathered at carpentry, sewing, cooking and cleaning. 

And that smell under the crowd of bodies and food and work. So familiar and so forgotten. 

“This way,” their guide said, his first words in a quavering voice. 

They walked up the stairs, spinning upward and Bucky reached for her again, their hands tangling while Steve forged ahead on the stairs, leading them. Forever leading them and holding them up with his strong straight back that time couldn’t bend. Natasha, out of long habit, placed her feet exactly where he had, her smaller shoes inside imaginary footprints that embraced them. 

At the top, their guide clung to a railing to regain his breath, hands tight and eyes shuttered closed. A wide balcony overlooked the balcony, a round table stands there large enough for twenty chairs each the same size. There were words on the back, unusual and tangled. Was The Dag a name? A title? Both? 

Their guide gasped and a woman walked out of a corner room. For a moment, Natasha was shaken. When was the last time she had seen another red head? It shone in its copper curls and she wanted to reach out and touch it. 

“Gonah,” she reached for their guide with tender hands. 

“I’m fine.” 

“I told you not to take another shift, go to the bunk and rest, understand?” 

“Yes,” he leaned into her touch as hungry as a dog, then reluctantly peeled away. 

“Hi,” Steve held out his hand, an instinct undimmed. “I’m Steve, this is Bucky and Natasha.” 

But the woman did not look at Steve or Bucky. Her eyes fell to Natasha. 

“Who are these men to you?” She asked and it was soft and hard all at once, the sting of a well honed sword. 

“We belong to each other and no others,” Natasha lifted her chin in challenge. 

“And they have never shown you violence?” The eyes were fierce as the skin was soft, Natasha determined. There was iron in this woman’s blood. 

“We have been violent, but never to each other.” 

“I’m Capable,” she held out both her hands, palms to the sky,”put yours on mine and greet me sister.” 

“I do not have sisters, anymore,” but Natasha placed her hands lightly over Capable’s. 

“I’m sorry for your loss,” Capable squeezed her hands briefly then stepped away. 

“Thank you,” Natasha stepped back, a prickle of warmth rising in her gut. 

“How did you find us? We don’t get many new visitors since we erected the wall.” 

Natasha waited, but Steve said nothing. He had ceded the floor to her. 

“A man came to our fire and drew us a map.” 

“What did he look like?” Capable asked, a twitch of a smile on her lips. 

“Everyone looks like sand out there.” 

“There must be something though...” And Natasha could taste hope, so she tried. Perhaps even that lost man belonged to someone once. 

“Like someone haunted and hungr and weathered. He looked past us.” 

“Ah, that’s him,” Capable smiled. “I’ll have to tell her later, but for now, I shouldn’t keep you from it any longer. I know it’s what you came to see.” 

She turned on her heels, barefoot, but the soles well calloused. The feet of a woman who could run. 

“There,” Bucky whispered. 

Yes. 

There.   
Natasha breathed in. 

Steve breathed out. 

Bucky fell against them both, arms round their shoulders and bright drops in his eyes. 

It must’ve been a vault once, the great door torn asunder by some massive machine and laid to the side. Now, at it’s core there was a tree. It stretched upward, turning a little on itself and from it’s branches....

“The last one was half-rotted,” Steve....when had Steve fallen, on his knees suddenly and face turned up. “Do you...” 

“We split it,” she echoed. “I remember.” 

The room was filled with riotous life, the smell that Bucky had caught. The smell of green things thriving. But none of them had eyes for the tomatoes, berries and zucchini. All they saw were apples. 

Capable reached up with a sure hand and plucked free one fat red fruit. From her belt came a knife and she carved it, four slices. To Natasha she handed the other three. 

“For you and yours. Welcome.” 

Natasha put the first slice to Steve’s lips and he took it from her fingers. For Bucky, she bit his slice in then half again in deference to his softened teeth. When both of them were chewing, eyes closed and breathing soft, she took her own. 

The white flesh parted and spilled. It was almost too much. Brightness and sour and tart and sweet overloading her shriveled tongue. It crunched, loud and defiant in the temple silence of the room. 

Once, when they were all still

still unstill 

Clint’s hands on a hammer and nails in his mouth

tall grass swaying 

cooling in the window with thick brown crust 

cinnamon, white sugar, flour   
abundance and richness 

home  
home 

There’s metal at her face and nose, she bites on it, teeth scarring over dents left from previous encounters. Grief came to her in sharpness. Tears were Steve’s provence, he wept for them all and stalwart acceptance lodged in Bucky’s silences, but hers was their anger and she had enough for them all. 

Capable had walked away, her back to them. Two old men stand at either side of her, identical sentinels that echo their guide. Later, she will find that Capable went by another name, that Mema was mother to a dying breed of short lived men. This next generation of children were stronger, built to last for far longer. 

Later, there would be the other too, these rods of steel that held up this Nueden by sheer force of will. Later, they would learn all each other’s names. 

Bucky would be drawn to Capable like those broken children and he would teach them all dances that died record players, the music played out on improvisational instruments: foxtrot to drums of stretched lizard skin and horns of discarded bones. Steve would become part Toast the Knowing’s teachers, children and adults gathered to hear the True Stories of their world from his lips. 

Now though as Natasha rose from her red eyed stupor, someone else stood before her. And for a strange, fragmented moment, Natasha mistook her for Maria though they could not look less alike. Something in her bearing, the dignity maybe or clear depths in the eyes. 

“Furiosa,” the woman holds her palms aloft, metal and real. Natasha places hers over them without pause. Her trust automatic and deeper than she can put words too. “You remind me of a woman I knew once. Long ago.” 

“Funny,” Natasha summoned the thin blade of a smile. “I was about to tell you the same thing.” 

They eat at Furiosa’s table, all the food garden fresh and no one surprised as they consume it. Everyone else, even Bucky, involved in loud conversation with plates and utensils clacking. Furiosa sat, legs folded and ate each bite with care. Natasha studied her with care, this sword turned to a plowshare. 

“How old are you?” The question startled Natasha, tumbling into their crafted quiet. 

“Very,” she allowed.

“That’s what I thought. What did you do Before?” 

“I killed mostly. So did they,” Natasha nodded at Steve and Bucky who were balancing spoons on their noses to prove...something. She hadn’t been listening. “Mostly to try to help.”

“And now?” 

“We’re trying to retire.” 

“It comes in stages.” 

There was a room for them, one bed large enough for them all. In the RV, they slept in shifts, years of rotation that left someone weary, but it wasn’t hard to jigsaw all three together again. Bucky in the middle, his heavy arm wrapped over Steve’s middle and Natasha fitted against the curve of his back with her lips pressed to the hollow between his shoulders. 

Later, they would wash themselves in a bath of deep clear water and become clean in ways they had forgotten was possible. 

Later still, they would relearn how to breath. 

And even later, Natasha would tell their story to Furiosa under the setting sun and neither of them would cry, but it would 

it would rain

as if their sorrows pierced 

and broke open the sky.


End file.
